1. A few thoughts on bad books by great writers. Bad books should be seen as necessary failures that push writers to better work.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
2. Philip Roth wrote a string of middling, flawed & terrible books in the early 1970s (Great American Novel, Our Gang, My Life as a Man)
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Replying to @HeerJeet
3. Flawed Roth novels were a necessary stage where he worked out his outrageous comic spiel & anger, before more controlled Zuckerman series
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Replying to @HeerJeet
4. Updike's Rabbit Redux is weakest of book of series (especially utterly unconvincing engagement with black radicalism & hippies) BUT ...
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Replying to @HeerJeet
5. ...with Redux, Updike became more ambitious. Rabbit, Run was narrow book but Redux & later books tried to encompass USA
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Replying to @HeerJeet
6. "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You" is Alice Munro's weakest collection, a book of uncertain, undeveloped stories.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
7. Yet with "Something" Munro broke with her earlier reflexive habit of epiphanic endings, shuffling narrative deck: seeds of great work.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
7. We have to fail to succeed: writers have to risk writing atrocious books in order to get the courage to do their best work.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
8. Middle period Dickens isn't bad but it's often flawed, thwarted or not quite cohesive: Barnaby Rudge, Old Curiosity Shop, even Chuzzlewit
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Replying to @HeerJeet
8. Yet in his middling middle-period works we see Dickens figuring out how to organize a big novel, preparing for Bleak House, etc.
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9. Of course, there is another type of bad writing by good writers, which is just writers getting dotty: see late period Robert Heinlein.
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